“But, Jack, when my steps sounded so firm the day I left you at Versailles it was the firmness of force of will fighting to accept the inevitable.  For I had seen your face.  It was like mine, and yet I had to give you up!  I had to give you up knowing that I might not see you again; knowing that this tragic, incomprehensible fatality had set you against me; knowing that any further efforts to see you meant only pain for Alice and for me.  Whatever happiness she knew came from you, and that she should have.  And remember, Jack, that out of all this tragedy I, too, had my point of view.  I had my moments of reproach against fate; my moments of bitterness and anger; my moments when I set all my mind with, volcanic energy into my affairs in order to forget my misfortune.  I had to build for the sake of building.  Perhaps that hardened me.

“When you came home I saw that you were mine in blood but not mine in heart.  All your training had been foreign, all of estrangement from the business and the ways of the home-country; which you could not help, I could not help, nothing now could help.  But, after all, I had been building for you; that was my new solace.  I wanted you to be equal to what was coming to you, and that change meant discipline.  To be frank with you, as you have been with me, you were sickly, hectic, dreamy; and when word came that you must go to the desert if your life were to be saved—­well, Jack, I had to put affection aside and consider this blow for what it was, and think not of kind words but of what was best for you and your future.  I knew that my duty to you and your duty to yourself was to see you become strong, and for your sake you must not return until you were strong.

“Now, as for the scene in the drawing-room the other day:  I could not forget what Jasper Ewold had said of me.  That was one thing.  Another was that I had detected his influence over you; an influence against the purpose and steadiness that I was trying to inculcate in you; and suddenly coming upon him in my own house, in view of his enmity and the way in which he had spoken about me, I was naturally startled and indignant and withdrew to avoid a scene.  That is all, Jack.  I have answered your questions to the best of my knowledge.  If others occur to you I will try my best to answer them, too;” and the father seemed ready to submit every recess of his mind to the son’s inquisition.

“You have answered everything,” said Jack; “everything—­fairly, considerately, generously.”

There was a flash of triumph in the father’s eyes.  Slowly he rose and stood with his finger-ends caressing the blotting-pad.  Jack rose at the same time, his movement automatic, instinctively in sympathy with his father’s.  His head was bowed under stress of the emotion, incapable of translation into language, which transfixed him.  It had all been made clear, this thing that no one could help.  His feeling toward his mother could never change; but penetrating to the depths in which it had been held sacred was a new feeling.  The pain that had brought him into the world had brought misery to the authors of his being.  There was no phantom except the breath of life in his nostrils which they had given him.